Blair seen recently. Picture via ITV News
WHY HAS THE HAY FESTIVAL OFFERED THIS POLITICAL RELIC YET ANOTHER SHOWCASE FOR HIS PREDICTABLE DOCTRINE OF STALE NEOLIBERALISM?
When can we hope to see and hear the last of Tony Blair? In 2020, faced with the challenges of pandemic and lockdown, the Hay Festival’s organisers responded admirably, taking the opportunity to democratise the event through broadcasting its programme online for free. At this year’s festival, they could choose to platform a whole variety of new and underrepresented voices in literature, art and culture both in Wales and around the world. Why, instead, have they offered this political relic yet another showcase for his predictable doctrine of stale neoliberalism?
Blair’s interview is to form part of a series of talks on “the future of democracy”. This is, to say the least, an ironic billing given the lucrative links he has formed with dictatorships around the world, which surely run counter to Hay’s message of liberalism and free expression. More obviously, Blair’s dragging of Britain into the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was one of the most undemocratic measures in the country’s post-war history.
We should need little reminding of the results of his actions: the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi people in addition to 179 British servicemen and women, the destruction of Iraq’s society, and the ongoing effects across the world of destabilisation and displacement.
In 2016, the Chilcot Report found that Blair had deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq, misusing scattered and tenuous intelligence in order to swing political and public opinion behind his enthusiasm for military action, despite widespread warnings about the potential consequences of doing so. The report’s publication inspired calls within the anti-war movement and the wider public for Blair to stand trial at the Hague.
Blair, however, rejected the report’s conclusions with the same arrogance that led him at the time to disregard warnings from his own intelligence officials. In office, he had also dismissed and ignored the largest public protests in living memory against the invasion, which took place throughout 2002-3 across Britain and around the world: in February 2003, up to ten million people took part in co-ordinated protests in up to sixty countries. Blair’s point-blank refusal to listen to popular opinion was instrumental in turning a generation off democratic protest and disillusioning them with constitutional politics.
Iraq has come to pollute public remembrance of Blair to such an extent that it overshadows the parts of the post-1997 Labour programme which are widely seen as positive achievements – like the Good Friday Agreement, the minimum wage, or Scottish and Welsh devolution.
Ten years after the conflict began, 50% of British people still believed Blair deliberately set out to mislead the public. In 2017, a third of Britons surveyed supported his being tried as a war criminal. When Blair published his memoir in 2010, bookshops reported a spate of customers reshelving the book under sections including Horror, Fantasy and True Crime.
However, it’s easy at this distance to forget the ordure that attached to Blair and his coterie for other reasons once the post-1997 sheen wore off. Blair introduced tuition fees, cut benefits to single mothers, and pursued privatisation of public services and deregulation of business under the guise of “reform” and “modernisation”. Public outrage over sleaze saw Blair’s ally Peter Mandelson resign from government twice – but both men are now seeking renewed relevance in public life.
Like the attempted rehabilitation of George W Bush in the US, this should be resisted. Both developments are almost certainly a product of centrist nostalgia, after the turbulence of 2016 and its populist upsurges on left and right. But the stasis and slow rot that set in across so much of Britain, before it found expression in 2016’s crisis-point, was as much of Blair’s making as Thatcher’s. Following Thatcherism’s onslaught on industrial communities, New Labour’s economic policies offered only short-term sticking-plasters which did nothing to address the structural impoverishment and political neglect of these areas.
Blair’s recent appearances have seen him call for the “deconstruction” of the Labour party – presumably keen to finish the job he began while in office. But at the very point he saw fit to offer this advice, Labour in Wales was obtaining a historically high level of support in the Senedd elections, based on exactly the political traditions and principles which Blair has built a career on scorning. Blair is a political pariah, not a messiah.
Welsh history is full of movements in support of peace, justice, socialism and international solidarity – principles of which Blair understands little and exemplifies less. There are any number of voices outside the literary elite, denied the power, influence and attention lavished on the likes of Blair, who could more valuably and profitably contribute to a conversation at Hay on “the future of democracy”. Wales, like the world, has nothing to learn from this man.
Rhian E Jones’ is a writer and broadcaster and co-edits Red Pepper Magazine. Her latest book is Paint Your Town Red
